The Expected is as Yet Inconceivable
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Georges Florovsky was a twentieth century Russian Orthodox theologian who taught at Princeton near the end of his career.
In a beautiful way, he mines the scriptures and the tradition to express the mystery and the hope given to us in the “pledge” that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. I thought I’d add a few eggs to your Easter basket by sharing his meditation on the Gospel of Resurrection along with some clarifying comments from yours truly.
Florovsky begins by making the always helpful and counter-cultural point that, according to the scriptures, death is not natural.
Florovsky writes:
“Death is a catastrophe for humanity.
This is the basic principle of the whole of Christian anthropology.
Man is an amphibious being, both spiritual and corporeal, and so he was created by God. Body belongs organically to the unity of human existence. And this was perhaps the most striking novelty in the original Christian message.”
Remember, the gospel which the primal church took into the world was firstly news not of the crucifixion but of the resurrection— the former is only redemptive in light of the latter. As much as the word of the cross, however, the Gospel of Resurrection was absurd and ghastly to a world shaped by the Greek religion of Plato.
Florovsky makes this explicit:
“The preaching of the Resurrection as well as the preaching of the Cross was foolishness and a stumbling—block to Gentiles.
St. Paul had already been called a “babbler” by the Athenian philosophers just “because he proclaimed to them Jesus and the resurrection.”
The Greek mind was always rather disgusted by the body.The attitude of an average Greek in early Christian times was strongly influenced by Platonic ideas, and it was a common opinion that the body was a kind of a “prison,” in which the fallen soul was incarcerated and confined. The Greeks dreamt rather of a complete and final dis-incarnation.”
The Gospel of Resurrection, in other words, was more than a stumbling block to pagans. It was deeply unsettling. It sounded to them like the opposite of good news.
“The Christian belief in a coming Resurrection could only confuse and frighten the Gentile mind.It meant simply that the prison will be everlasting, that the imprisonment will be renewed again and for ever. The expectation of a bodily resurrection would befit rather an earthworm suggested the Roman antagonist of the Church, Celsus, and he jeered in the name of common sense. He nicknamed Christians a “flesh-loving crew.”
With all Greek philosophers the fear of impurity was much stronger than the dread of sin. Indeed, sin to them just meant impurity. Evil comes from pollution, not from the perversion of the will. One must be liberated and cleansed from this filth.
And at this point Christianity brings a new conception of the body as well. From the very beginning Docetism was rejected as the most destructive of temptations, a sort of dark anti–gospel, proceeding from the Anti–Christ (I John 4.2–3). And St. Paul emphatically preaches “the redemption of our body” (Romans 8.23).
St. John Chrysostom commented:
“Paul deals a death-blow here to those who depreciate the physical nature and revile our flesh. It is not flesh, as he would say, that we put off from ourselves, but corruption. the body is one thing, corruption is another. True, the body is corrupt, but it is not corruption. The body dies, but it is not death. The body is the work of God, but death and corruption entered in by sin. Therefore, he says, I would put off from myself that strange thing which is not proper to me. And that strange thing is not the body, but corruption.”
The point he’s making, the hope he’s clarifying is that the future resurrected life shatters and abolishes not the body, but that which clings to it, corruption and death.
This is the simile used by St. Paul. “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption” (I Corinthians 15.42).
The earth, as it were, is sown with human ashes in order that it may bring forth fruit, by the power of God, on the Great Day.
Florovsky continues:
“Like seed cast on the earth, we do not perish when we die, but having been sown, we rise” (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation).
Each grave is already a shrine of incorruption.
The resurrection, however, is no mere return or repetition. The Christian dogma of the General Resurrection is not that eternal return which was professed by the Stoics. The resurrection is the true renewal, the transfiguration, the reformation of the whole creation. Not just a return of what had passed away, but a heightening, a fulfillment of something better and more perfect: “And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain… It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15.37, 44).
Resurrection is not resuscitation, neither for Jesus nor for us.
Resurrection does not mean Jesus’s life simply starts up again.
Nor will it so mean for us.
A profound change will take place.
And yet the individual identity will be preserved.
Florovsky elaborates:
St. Paul’s distinction between the “natural” body and the “spiritual” body obviously calls for a further interpretation. And probably we have to collate it with another distinction he makes in Philippians 3.2: the body “of our humiliation and the body of His glory.” Yet the mystery passes our knowledge and imagination: “It has not yet appeared what we shall be” (I John 3.2). But as it is, Christ has risen from the dead, the first–fruits of those who have fallen asleep (I Corinthians 15.20).
The Lord’s flesh does not suffer corruption, for it abides in the very bosom of the Life, in the Hypostasis of the Word, Who is Life. And in this incorruption, the Body has been transfigured into a state of glory. The body of humiliation has been buried, and the body of the glory rose from the grave.
In the death of Jesus the powerlessness of death over Him was revealed. In the fullness of His human nature Our Lord was mortal. And He actually died. Yet death did not hold Him. “It was not possible that He should be holden of it,” (Acts 2.24) As St. John Chrysostom puts it, “death itself in holding Him pangs as in travail, and was sore beset…, and He so rose as never to die.”
He is Life Everlasting, and by the very fact of His death He destroys death. The whole fabric of human nature in Christ proved to be stable and strong. The disembodiment of the soul was not consummated into a rupture.
Even in common death of man, as St. Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, the separation of soul and body is never absolute, a certain connection is still there.
In the death of Christ this connection proved to be not only a “connection of knowledge”: His soul never ceased to be the “vital power” of the body. Thus this death in all its reality, as a true separation and disembodiment, was rather like a sleep.
“Then was man’s death shown to be but a sleep” as St. John of Damascus says.
The reality of death is not yet abolished, but its powerlessness is now revealed. The Lord really and truly died. But in Jesus’s death the power of the resurrection was manifest, which is now latent in every death.
Your death is certain, yet because of Jesus’s death, it’s just as certain that the power of Easter is already latent in your death.
“In the body of the Incarnate One the interim between death and resurrection is foreshortened. “It is sown in dishonor: it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness: it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body: it is raised a spiritual body” (I Corinthians 15.43–44). In the death of the Incarnate One this mysterious growth of the seed was consummated in three days: Triduum mortis.
The Lord rises from the dead, as a Bridegroom comes forth from the chamber. This was accomplished by the power of God, as also the General Resurrection will in the last day be accomplished by the power of God. And in the Resurrection the Incarnation is completed and consummated a victorious manifestation of Life within human nature, a grafting of immortality into the human composition.”
The Resurrection of Christ was a victory not over his death only, but over death in general.
The hopelessness of dying has been abolished
“In His resurrection the whole of humanity, all human nature, is co-resurrected with Him: “the human race is clothed in incorruption.”
Co-resurrected — not indeed in the sense that all are actually raised from the grave: men do still die.”
St. Paul is emphatic on this point.
The resurrection of Christ would become meaningless if it were not a universal accomplishment. And faith in Christ itself would lose any sense and become empty and vain. If Christ’s resurrection is not a harbinger of the resurrection of all, there would be nothing to believe in.
“As Athanasius says, “Corruption ceasing and being put away by the grace of Resurrection, we are henceforth dissolved for a time only, according to our bodies’ mortal nature; like seeds cast into the earth, we do not perish, but sown in the earth we shall rise again, death being brought to nought by the grace of the Savior” (On the Incarnation).
All will rise. From henceforth every disembodiment is but temporary. The dark vale of Hades is abolished by the power of the life-giving Cross. St. Gregory of Nyssa strongly stresses time organic interdependence of the Cross and the Resurrection: “For as the principle of death took its rise in one person and passed on in succession through the whole of human kind, in like manner the principle of the Resurrection extends from one person to the whole of humanity… For when, in that concrete humanity which He had taken to Himself, the soul after the dissolution returned to the body, then this uniting of the several portions passes, as by a new principle, in equal force upon the whole human race. This then is the mystery of God’s plan with regard to His death and His resurrection from the dead.”
In other words, Christ’s resurrection is a restoration of the fullness and wholeness of human existence, a re-creation of the whole human race, a “new creation.” St. Gregory follows here faithfully in the steps of St. Paul. There is the same contrast and parallelism of the two Adams. The General Resurrection is the consummation of the Resurrection of Our Lord, the consummation of His victory over death and corruption. And beyond the historical time there will be the future Kingdom, “the life of the age to come.” Then, at the close, for the whole creation the “Blessed Sabbath,” the very “day of rest,” the mysterious “Seventh day of Creation,” will be inaugurated for ever.
The expected is as yet inconceivable.
But the pledge is given.
Christ is risen.”
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